Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (2 page)

“Uncle Kurt!” she yelled and ran into his arms. “Guess what? Only 31 days until our birthday.”

“No way, another birthday? I’m looking at 24. How old are
you
going to be this time? Eight?”

“Ten,” she snarled, playfully angry at the familiar tease. Kurt was joking, but Sabrina did look nearer seven than nine.

He feigned a wince. “Double figures? Tough break. It’s all downhill from there, kid. Trust me.”

“But downhill is good. It’s easier than going up.” Sabrina stuck her tongue out at Kurt.

He turned to Randy. “How did something that came from you get so smart?”

“She got Lisa’s brains.”

“Yeah,” said Sabrina, nodding in agreement, “and JJ got Dad’s. His looks, too.”

Kurt laughed. “Where is your brother, anyway?”

“He’s tuned out in his room,” Randy answered. “The usual. There’s no point going in — he won’t see or hear you.”

“Oh well. I’ll nip up to see him before I go, just to let him know I was here.”

Randy hobbled through to the sofa, leaving Kurt and Sabrina in the hallway.

“Are you going to another funeral?” she asked as he took off his loafers and suit jacket.

“This is a different suit. It’s for my contest, remember?”

“Oh yeah. Dad said not to get my hopes up ‘cause you won’t win.”

“Then it’s just as well your dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Kurt winked and Sabrina giggled. He led her into the kitchen and opened a cupboard. “I don’t have time to make a real dinner this week but we could do some soup if you want?”

She did, and keenly collected the ingredients as Kurt read them out from his phone. He selected the recipe and sent it to his Lenses. The ingredients lay on the worktop and numbers appeared above them in the order they would be needed.

“Carrot first,” he said.

Sabrina handed it to him. Kurt looked at the carrot until dotted lines appeared then chopped it at the instructed intervals. Sabrina tipped the sliced carrot into the blender.

Kurt looked back down at his ingredients. The cilantro was marked “2” but he had to wait almost three seconds for the Lenses to tell him to wash it. How anyone else could find such lag acceptable was a mystery.

Sabrina stood on a chair to rinse the cilantro under the tap. After a few similar procedures she grew bored of following second-hand instructions. “Uncle Kurt, when can I get my own UltraLenses?”

“You’re too young for things like that,” he answered without looking up.

“But Janey Fisher has a pair and she’s only a month older than me!”

Kurt pressed blend and looked into Sabrina’s eyes. “That’s because I don’t care about protecting Janey Fisher. These things aren’t for kids, okay? You’ll be old enough for long enough. Now be a good girl and tell your dad his soup is nearly ready.”

Kurt’s idea of making soup was piling ingredients into Randy’s industrial-strength blender and leaving it on until the motor made the liquid hot. “The beauty of a good recipe is its simplicity,” his father always used to say. Kurt took simplicity to its limit and his dubious masterpiece was ready to serve inside four minutes.

He set the bowls down on the hardwood table and fetched three glasses from the matching cupboard. He appreciated the size of the room when it took him several seconds to walk back with them. It was a far cry from his own dingy kitchenette.

It may not have been in the best neighbourhood but Randy’s whole house was much nicer than Kurt’s. Randy had been high up at the Lexington brewery before the crash, a position which had enabled he and Lisa to secure a mortgage when the banks were turning almost everyone away. Kurt and Randy’s parents had nothing to leave them after the crash, but the payout from Lisa’s life insurance meant that Randy could afford to keep the family home despite his incapacitation. How long he would be unable to work and how long the money would sustain the family was unclear. Kurt wanted to win the contest for them as much as himself.

Sabrina returned with Randy just as Kurt was pouring the soup into their bowls, straight from the blending jug.

“Always a classy service when your Uncle Kurt’s around, huh?”

Everyone laughed. Kurt was glad of the normality having been able to think of nothing but the contest all week. Randy quickly brought him back to reality.

“So how are you feeling about tonight? Have you got the pitch ironed out?”

Kurt coughed as he forced down a mouthful of soup, too hot from the overly-effective blender. “More or less, yeah. I know what I’m selling and I know how to sell it, I just don’t know if it’s the right way to sell it to
them
.”

“It would be a lot easier for me to help you if I knew what you were pitching.”

“You know I can’t tell you,” said Kurt. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, obviously, it’s just… there’s a lot at stake tonight. Everything. You know how long I’ve been working on this stuff. When the UltraLenses came out I took a few steps back to redesign the concept for full compatibility because they were so much better than any of the glasses, and I’m finally there. Even if the game is rigged, I can’t not win. And when I do, we’ll be set for life.”

Randy waved a finger in the air. “There’s no we, hotshot. Your money will be your money. The only advice I can give you is to deliver the benefits of your idea in the present tense. All good pitches centre around selling the benefits, and words like
is
and
does 
do that better than
will
. Say “
my idea changes everything
,” not “
my idea will change everything
.” Even for the past, present is better. That’s all I know.”

“That’s actually good. I hadn’t thought to sell the benefits as if they already exist.”

“Can I help, too?” asked Sabrina.

“Of course you can,” Kurt smiled.

She put down her spoon. “Well, our teacher says it’s a waste of time trying to make someone want something. You have to make them think they need it.”

“What subject was that in?”

“Marketing.”

Kurt turned to Randy. “When did they start teaching nine-year-olds about marketing?”

Randy shrugged. “It’s good advice though.”

“It is,” Kurt agreed. “Thanks, kid. So I’ll tell them that my idea will give them what they need.”

“No! Remember what Dad said, too: tell them that it
gives
them what they need. Always present tense. And move your hands when you say the important words.” Sabrina sliced the air like a ninja.

“Honestly, champ, I wish you could do the pitch for me. You’d walk onto the stage all adorable in a little dress and then just blitz the judges with marketing spiel and choppy hand-gestures. No one would know what hit them! At least you’ll be watching, though, right? It starts at 7.30 and my pitch should be about 45 minutes after that.”

“What time is it now?” she asked.

Kurt looked down to the clock in the bottom left of his vista. The time popped up. “Holy fu…Uncle Kurt has to go! It’s almost seven and I’m due there at quarter past. When did it get so late? I’ll go and say bye to JJ and ask him to clean this up since you helped make it.”

Kurt ran upstairs and opened the bedroom door to find Julian lying on his bed staring at the ceiling. He was wearing earphones and looked pretty tuned-in to whatever his phone was streaming to his Lenses. Like Sabrina, he had their mother’s blonde hair. Other than that he looked like a younger, healthier, angstier version of Randy. Kurt saw nothing of himself when he looked at Julian.

His bedroom was a mess but no worse than Kurt’s own. The walls were unusually bare for a teenager’s room and there was no TV, just space and dust where it had sat before he gave it to Sabrina when the UltraLenses rendered real screens obsolete.

Replicating the experience of watching TV was one thing the Lenses did brilliantly. They effectively worked as two screens, capable of creating visual depth in the same way that humans did without them. Native 3D full-screen immersion wasn’t for everyone and was only compatible with specially-filmed content, so the Lenses offered a range of viewing options. Video could be displayed in a box of any size and at any angle so as to give the illusion of distance.

Some people liked to watch a 42-inch screen ten feet from their chair; the Lenses let them. Others preferred a laptop-size screen at arm’s length; the Lenses gave it to them. All a user had to do was select the desired size on their phone and the virtual screen would stick to its set location. Kurt knew that Julian would see his video whichever direction he faced because his eyes had that unmistakable glaze of someone in full-immersion.

He kneeled down by the bed and took out one of Julian’s earphones. “Yo, Julian.”

“What the— Oh, hey Uncle Kurt. What’s up?”

“I’ve got to run to the big contest. We made soup but your dad said you wouldn’t be hungry. It’s there if you want some, though. I came up to let you know I was here.”

“Cool. I’ll be watching. Good luck.”

“Thanks, kid. And do you think you could clear up the kitchen in a little while? Your sister helped me with the cooking and your dad’s not really up to it.”

Julian sat up. “Why would you make a mess if you’re not going to clean it up? If you’re leaving then she can do it.”

“I told her she didn’t have to. She helped make the soup.”

“And the mess! It’s nothing to do with me. I’m not doing it.”

Kurt sat down on the bed. “You know, I was only nine when you were born — the same age Sabrina is now. And I was your age when she came along.”

“So?”

“So she had two parents and four grandparents but I was still expected to help out. Now it’s just your dad trying to raise the two of you and you don’t give him any help. Do you not think maybe he’d like to sit down like this now and again, staring at the ceiling like there’s no one else in the world?”

“He sits around the house all day! What do you think he does when we’re at school? Even
you
do more than him.” Julian lay down and put his earphones back in.

Kurt pulled one out again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well you don’t work, either, but at least you’ve got your computer stuff.”

“So you would rather I’d spent the last four years working at Tasmart or in some other dead-end job instead of studying? Is that your idea of how to get ahead?”

“Other people work while they study.”

“Other people weren’t building what I’ve been building until three and four every morning! I could have had loads of money if I’d spent that time working but sometimes rewards have to be deferred. You should be old enough to know that.”

Julian sat up to bring his face level with Kurt’s. “What rewards? Your stupid homemade operating system isn’t going to suddenly take over the world. Stop pretending it’s anything more than a hobby.”

“Maybe the OS
was
a hobby,” Kurt conceded, “but I’m not talking about that anymore. This contest is to find the best device or service to complement the UltraLenses. It’s really a publicity stunt for the SycaPhone but I’ve got something that will make their stupid phone obsolete before it’s even announced. What you can do with the Lenses now will seem like nothing once you see what I’m talking about.”

“Why, what is it?”

“Something that’ll win me a job for life at Sycamore. We’ll be all set. I’ll have more than enough money for all of us.”

Julian rolled his eyes and lay back down.

“You know what?” said Kurt, rising from the bed and moving to the door, “No. Not for you. For me, Sabrina and your dad. If you don’t worry about anyone else then why should anyone else worry about you?”

“It’s alright. I know that no one has worried about me since she died. Not him and especially not you.”

“Stop being such a little drama queen. You lost her that day, fine. But what about your dad? He lost both of his parents and his wife,
and
the ability to provide for his children.” Kurt saw that Julian seemed to be really listening, for once, so he kept going. “And his son blames him for all of it. How do you think that is for him?”

Julian was quiet for a few seconds then looked up at Kurt. “Get out of my room.”

Kurt slammed the bedroom door and noisily descended the stairs.

“What the hell is going on?” asked Randy.

“Your son is turning into an asshole, that’s what. Everything is always about him.”

“He’s 14, Kurt. Of course everything’s about him. You can’t just go in and tell him you’re leaving so he has to do the dishes. Did you even ask how his day was?”

Kurt ignored most of what Randy said. “When I was 14 I had to—

“And Julian isn’t you! Everyone else isn’t golden-boy Kurt, alright?”

“Why did I even come here?” Kurt shouted, inches from Randy’s face.

Sabrina tiptoed out from the kitchen to see what everyone was yelling at. Kurt kneeled down beside her and kissed her on the forehead.

“Watch the contest on channel 43,” he whispered. “Okay?”

She nodded.

“I promise I’ll win it. Just for you.”

~

Kurt’s anger took him beyond Randy’s rusty gate before he realised that he had left without collecting a bus fare. He was going to be late and the rain was back.

Returning to ask for money with his tail between his legs wasn’t an option so Kurt continued into the soaking night. His quick feet arrived at the dead cat’s corner to find that the birds had been scared away by the rain. Kurt chose not to look at the cat for long but he couldn’t avoid the offensive smell, even worse now that raindrops were lashing the corpse and carrying its blood into the sewers.

Fresh death was pungent and the air was full of it.

His hurried walk turned into a run until he was clear of the smell. He slowed down and focused his gaze in the bottom-left corner of his vista to call up the clock again. Its warning that he was due backstage in ten minutes saw Kurt’s pace pick back up. He was a good runner — admittedly less so than normal, thanks to the squelching loafers — so arrived at the university’s ancient campus only a few minutes late.

The plan had always been to visit Professor Walker before entering the auditorium. Everything else in Kurt’s plan had gone woefully wrong — it had decided to rain; he couldn’t afford to get a bus; birds had started eating cats; Julian had provoked him into snapping at Randy; he had made a foolish promise to Sabrina; it had decided to rain again — but he wasn’t prepared to budge on this. Asserting control in the present would give him a much-needed sense of control over the evening as a whole, however feeble such reasoning appeared to the more rational side of his brain. The ‘visit the kids’ section of the plan was a write-off but ‘visit the professor’ and ‘win the contest’ were still up for grabs.